To add to that: Read through @SciresM's excellent writeup on the topic of game encryption.
That aside, a seed shouldn't go up even just a second earlier. The time it goes live seems to be some kind of automatic mechanism as far as I know. However, it seems that occasionally, it is unlocked for short periods of time; I presume that is part of testing (from the linked writeup: "The Legend of Zelda: Triforce Heroes, for example, had its content lock seed published a month before its release date, despite being pre-purchasable. This meant that anyone who was paying attention could have been playing that game several weeks in advance, though I don't know that anyone publically exploited this."). However, I'd be surprised if Nintendo hadn't stepped up their security and stopped testing in production after those blunders.

To me, Project Pokémon is, first and foremost, a community about researching Pokémon and collecting events. There's nothing to be gained from joking answers when someone asks a question about how some game mechanic works; it's annoying at best and causes actual confusion at worst. The tone of the forums matches the nature of the topics at hand.
Additionally, I understand if you feel that staff are being a tad too professional, but excessive friendliness may also be very uncomfortable. That feeling of uncomfortableness may expand rapidly into the territory of feeling sexually harrassed as well; people can and will be easily offended or feel sexually harrassed. The less opportunities for that to happen, the better, I'd argue. I believe I speak for everybody if I say that avoiding insinuations of sexual harrassment, justified or not, should be a priority of all staff members. That aside, not choosing a serious tone carries the risk of the message not to reach the recipient because they think they needn't take the message seriously.
I find the recent trend of corporations and other groups to be faux-friendly rather annoying. A prime example is Discord Inc., who seem to feel the need to add memes to everything. The latest corporate blog post was written by Nelly, "Chief Robot Hamster. Eater of cheeses. Maker of boops." I believe it's rather obvious that this trend becomes quite tiresome after some time.
I am absolutely not just a bitter old man who's become so much of a cynic that people having fun around him annoys him already.

On a different note:
adblocker interstition notice
requires JavaScript to go through this (CSS magic should also help, or just display them all at once)
hosted on some shared host that actually blacklisted one of the IPs I tried accessing it from
question 3 shows a Latios, which isn't even a flying type
Did I accidentally walk into some really postmodern spam?

Dear coltonsmogon,
In accordance with the site-wide rule "Do not spam," you have been banned from participating in Project Pokémon. Project Pokémon has a zero-tolerance policy about spam. Further details have been recorded below.
Sincerely,
xorhash

According to the Japanese Pokémon Global Link website[1] as reported by Serebii.net[2], thousands of people (5,954 to be precise) have been hit with bans from Online Play (Game Sync, Battle Competitions, Rating Battles, Global Missions).
Banned users will see error code 090-0212.[1,2]
The Pokémon Company has announced that they will continue their pursuit against people with edited save data.[1,2]
We urgently recommend not going online until we have more information on how these bans were triggered.
Sources:
[1] https://3ds.pokemon-gl.com/information/b87bc53f-7144-44ba-9a29-59bd00330d84
[2] http://serebii.net/news/2017/26-January-2017.shtml
View full article

That's just pretty sloppy coding. Party -> box should really just generate a warning that the stats will be regenerated if the Pokemon is removed from the box. Box -> party should just automatically generate the stats, given that the formula for stat generation given stat exp and DV is known.

https://github.com/iimarckus/pokered will make everything considerably easier for you, in particular sprite replacement and making sure that the sprite given is valid (IIRC the limit is 64x64 and with two or three shades of gray). Then you'll want to just replace the name and sprite of some mon, like Rattata, and adjust the route 1 encounter table.
If you want your scenario to happen with the first battle (i.e., before you even get a Pokemon), you'll also need to change the default battle type to the Safari Zone battle type.
grep(1) is your friend here since the source is relatively large.